I first met Denis Donaldson, or rather I met his name, a few days
after June 27 1970. The word on people’s lips on the streets of
the Short Strand was that he and a few other teenage members of
the local IRA saved the people of the Strand from a loyalist
pogrom.

The battle of St Matthew’s, as the attack became known, gave
birth to the modern IRA.

Denis Donaldson was a local hero.

Thirty-five years later by his own admission he has entered the
hall of infamy as an informer; a traitor to his country, the
movement he helped set up, his comrades, his friends and most of
all his devoted family.

I can hardly believe I have just written the previous paragraph.

Those of us close to Denis Donaldson were rocked by the informer
revelation.

The people of the Short Strand are in shock. It will take time to
overcome the personal and the political implications of it all.

But we will.

I am not a stranger to informers. On the three occasions I have
been to jail informers put me there. They are an occupational
hazard, an unsavoury fact of life. They never stopped me being a
republican and never will.

I should not be surprised, but I am, that Denis crossed to the
other side.

Freedom struggles carry a heavy price tag.

Every part of me has been tested to its outer limits by the
demands of the struggle.

I have walked behind the coffins of teenage comrades of mine.

I visited men and women in prison on hunger strike and watched
men dying in the H-blocks.

Behind bars I watched youths grow to men in their middle years.

I saw families’ grief-stricken when loyalist killers claimed a
child of theirs.

I experienced the pressure used to break people in interrogation
centres.

I know how difficult it is to maintain one’s composure under such
pressure.

There is no shame in breaking under interrogation. The shame is
in what Denis did when he left the interrogation centre.

He had options and unbelievably

he chose to betray everything

those who knew him thought he believed in.

Over the last week the word betrayal has been used most
frequently by those closest to Denis. It is how we feel.

If there ever was a stereotypical mould for an informer then
Denis Donaldson broke the mould.

He was charming, entertaining, witty and clever. He used these
fine qualities to conceal his double life of treachery.

I could not count the number of times I shared political ideas

with him.

It hurts deeply now to think he passed my thoughts to others for
money.

For those close to him the hurt runs deep because it is personal.

For others the cost is measured politically.

A friend described Denis as a ‘listening device’ for the Special
Branch.

Rarely did he suggest an original idea. He was not close to Gerry
Adams. He was not part of the small group of people in the
national leadership of Sinn Féin who developed the peace process.

He did not contribute to shaping the strategy, which led to the
IRA’s first cessation.

He was not part of the group handling the day-to-day negotiations
with the British and Irish governments over the last 10 years.

The informer revelation starkly confirms what Sinn Féin has been
saying for years.

Inside the British system there are powerful individuals who are
a law onto themselves.

These are the same people who killed human rights lawyer Pat
Finucane and hundreds of innocent Catholics because it served
their interests.

It is now clear there was a spy ring at Stormont. It was a
British spy ring run by British intelligence agencies.

They organised a coup and overthrew a democratically elected
government.

The issue now is will Tony Blair do anything about his agencies?

If Peter Hain’s comments are anything to go by then it is likely
we have not seen the last of the securocrats.

There is a very simple message in all of this drama: informers
come and informers go.

The struggle for a united Ireland, which they desperately seek to
bring down, carries on regardless.

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